SPECIAL REPORT: The U.S. Presidential Election in 1996

SPECIAL REPORT: The U.S. Presidential ElectionEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Election campaigns, like wars, are won through a combination of strategy, logistics, and the application of power. In 1996 Bill Clinton showed that while his style of governance may have been open to question, his political generalship was on a par with the military skills of the best. Through a brilliant bombardment with television imagery, and the most all-encompassing political poll-taking in U.S. history, the incumbent president smashed through the stratagems of his Republican opponent, Bob Dole, to win a victory that, for most of the year, was almost never in doubt. In the end, however, it was a resounding victory without coattails. Indeed, for much of the election year, the president campaigned without mentioning the name of the Democratic Party, while for their part the victorious Republicans who retained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate did so, at the end, with hardly an invocation of the beleaguered Dole. There was a reason for the symmetry of silences; both Clinton and the Republicans were campaigning more for rehabilitation in the eyes of the electorate than for a revolution of ideas or philosophies. In the end they proved to be running successfully against themselves, in two distinct branches of government.

This fact did not make the campaign cheap, however. Indeed, the elections of 1996 were the costliest in the history of the republic. By the end of the campaign, the Democrats were believed to have spent some $250 million and the Republicans $400 million--more than twice as much as in 1992. Immensely costly television campaigning and a saturation poll strategy caused the Democrats and the Clinton White House to construct a fund-raising machine of enormous ingenuity and rapacity--one whose dubious methods raised questions and investigations that would cast shadows deep into the second Clinton administration. As the year came to a close, Attorney General Janet Reno rejected the notion of an investigation of the Democratic campaign-funding machine by an independent counsel, but congressional hearings were sure to keep the pot boiling.

A considerable amount of the Republican money, by contrast, had been spent in warring among themselves. One of the five major Republican primary candidates, the wealthy publisher Steve Forbes, alone spent an estimated $25 million, largely in "attack" television advertising against eventual standard-bearer Dole. Despite such intense opposition, Dole had virtually locked up his party’s nomination by late March, long before the end of the exhausting string of Republican primaries ended in June. But Dole--73 years old in July, laconic, self-mocking, an inept orator more comfortable in Senate cloakrooms than on the hustings--proved unable to unite or inspire a party riven among conservative hard-liners and moderates, Christian fundamentalist activists and secular pragmatists, antiabortion campaigners and pro-choice supporters. His inability to inspire a coherent opposition drove away financial contributors and eventually revived the not-very-dormant presidential ambitions of the country’s richest political maverick, billionaire populist Ross Perot, who had won almost 19% of the vote in 1992. Sensing Dole’s weakness, Perot once again threw his hat into the ring as the Reform Party candidate, further dividing Dole’s potential supporters.

President Clinton, by contrast, was an enthusiastic, flesh-pressing lover of crowds and personal contact who was by most accounts more in his element as a campaigner than as a chief executive, and his energy not so subtly conveyed the generational gap between himself and his main opponent. Dole’s most eloquent appeal was at the Republican national convention in San Diego, Calif., when the wounded World War II veteran, whose right arm was permanently disabled, deliberately evoked the values of an earlier, simpler age by asking that voters consider him "a bridge to tranquillity." The ebullient Clinton, on the other hand, asked to be considered a "bridge to the 21st century."

The president’s path to victory was a vindication of the strategy of "triangulation" propounded and, for much of the time, orchestrated by his chief political strategist, Dick Morris, who fell from influence in a sex scandal on the same day that Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The strategy was based on the belief that after an erratic and disappointing first term, best symbolized by the failure of his ambitious and disastrous attempt to reform health care, Clinton had to present himself to American voters as standing both above and between the warring Democrats and Republicans.

The president made his first move in that direction in 1995 when, over the objections of many Democrats, he endorsed the notion of a balanced federal budget over seven years--a notion that had appeared in the successful 1994 Republican "Contract with America." Nearly a year and a half before election day, he followed that change with a series of television ads that took tough positions on anticrime measures and penalties. Meanwhile, his pollsters took soundings across the country to discover the uncertainties that most concerned the American public--issues of crime, educational decline, environmental degradation, and medical care for the elderly, to name just a few. They also polled to discover, long in advance of the actual fact, that Americans would likely blame congressional Republicans, led by the controversial speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, for any governmental paralysis that resulted from a budget deadlock in Washington, D.C. When the deadlock did occur, the Republicans, and Gingrich in particular, were marked as the proponents of radical risk and uncertainty. They were seen as making assaults on valued safety nets like Medicare that were considered vital entitlements by the middle-aged and elderly, despite the fact that the Republicans, as they frequently protested, were intent on merely slowing the rate of expansion of such programs, at least in the short term.

Under the circumstances the unfortunate strategy pursued by Dole during his primary campaign was tuned to buttress the Clinton plan. In the run-up to the early caucuses and primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, Dole, a moderate deal maker by nature, abandoned his middle-of-the-road principles to fend off the challenge from a more conservative rival, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. Dole abandoned his longtime support for affirmative action, took tough stances on denying benefits to illegal immigrants, and backtracked in his support for one of Congress’s rare restrictions on firearms, a selective ban on automatic weapons. Even as he did so, however, the consummate Washington insider was being outflanked on the economic right by dark horse Forbes and by another conservative populist, political commentator Patrick Buchanan.

Forbes harked back in policies and rhetoric to the supply-side economics of the Ronald Reagan administration. His salient campaign plank was a flat 17% income tax to replace the thicket of graduations and exemptions that had grown up since the last tax simplification, in 1986. An amateurish but disciplined campaigner who could draw on his private wealth without the restrictions that governed donated funds, Forbes clearly struck a chord among Americans still resentful of the powers and prerogatives of Beltway Washington. He also had the support of such popular Reagan-era figures as Jack Kemp, who had been George Bush’s secretary of housing and urban development. Buchanan represented another, more fundamentalist trend: the nativist, anticapitalist populism of the South and Midwest that had spawned radical movements in the 1930s. With Buchanan, a staunch Roman Catholic, this was allied with a hard-line antiabortion stance. Buchanan inveighed against immigration of all kinds, the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, and the general climate of excessive social tolerance. A few of his economic themes were echoed, more pallidly, by another major primary candidate, Lamar Alexander, formerly the secretary of education in the Bush administration. All three candidates emphasized the fact to unhappy Republican voters that the party front-runner, still a sitting senator and the majority leader, was a "despised creature" of Washington.

Defeating his disparate rivals cost Dole time, energy, and, above all, money. By early March, when Dole had not yet managed to clinch the nomination, Perot had begun talking about entering the presidential race. Over the ensuing weeks, as he managed to tighten his grip on the nomination, Dole was still unable to articulate a campaign theme that went much beyond portraying Clinton as a classic "tax-and-spend" liberal--a position that Clinton had by this time long and fairly convincingly abandoned. At the same time, using the most powerful advantage of executive incumbency, the president had managed to push through such measures as a minimum-wage hike and portable health insurance that solidified his traditional blue-collar constituency, despite his generally conservative fiscal stance. Nor was Dole able to capitalize on the greatest uncertainty about Clinton: the continuing doubts about his character, as expressed in his evasive stance on avoiding the draft as a student, his elasticity on issues of principle, and the many questions that had arisen about the family’s financial dealings during his gubernatorial tenure in Arkansas, collectively known as the Whitewater scandal.

As polls affirmed Dole’s sorry electoral state (Clinton at times enjoyed leads of 20 percentage points), he took a dramatic step to change his image as a Washington insider. In mid-May Dole announced that he would resign his Senate seat and leadership role, and he shed his conservative suit-and-tie image for shirtsleeved campaigning. The positive effect was short-lived, however. Then, in a desperate bit of apostasy, Dole suddenly announced a complete reversal of course in his not-well-articulated economic policies. The apostle of fiscal moderation embraced a 15% tax cut, and just before the San Diego convention he announced that Kemp, the party’s most articulate and energetic supply-sider, was his choice for vice president. The energetic 61-year-old Kemp, a former professional football quarterback, was also chosen to help counter the active and youthful image projected by Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore. Both the ideological and the image-making changes failed to impress voters, however. Kemp was deemed unimpressive in his single televised debate with the vice president, while Dole was judged even worse in his two debates with Clinton.

The president’s lead remained unassailable. In a final bid to rally an anti-Clinton majority, Dole appealed to independent Perot to withdraw from the race, but Perot called the plea "weird and inconsequential." In the final week of the campaign, the highly tuned Clinton machine sputtered only when revelations began to surface about the extent of the dubious fund-raising that had been undertaken, especially in Asian circles, to finance the juggernaut. Dole’s standing began to rise--but too little, too late. In the end he lost by 8.4 percentage points--almost exactly the margin held by Perot.

The message of the campaign was exactly what Clinton and his inner circle of poll-taking political professionals had perceived. The American people were conservative in their fiscal attitudes, concerned with reinforcing their social values and institutions, and impatient with ideological intransigence. In an improving economy, however, their long-standing collective optimism also came to the fore. The largest American demographic group, the so-called baby boomers, ultimately chose one of their own to lead them forward, rather than turning back to the past.

George Russell, a senior editor at Time International, is the author of Eyewitness: A History of Photojournalism.

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